COVID 1 managed to die out before becoming a pandemic. That's one reason people treated SARS-COV-2 as harmless until it already was a pandemic.
Epidemiologists and public health planners learned a lot from both. But when SARS-COV-3 comes around, they will still not have learned how to deal with the large numbers of people who will say it's not a problem even after it has caused the death of millions.
If you look at China, that is basically the worst nightmare of anyone who expresses doubts about how much we should trust the government to handle a pandemic. The situation is much different from ours no doubt, but it cannot be said that it's totally unreasonable to be scared of a government using a crisis to enforce authoritarian policies (what about terrorism? or drugs?).
IMO this is the same problem as the current left vs right divide in America: no one wants to concede that the other side might have a point. Instead, they'd rather make snide comments about how the other side is a bunch of children/stupid/racist/whatever, instead of understanding that other humans may have been raised different and have different opinions. There is no attempt to resolve, just overpower.
Consider a similar scenario: climate change. Either this is a real, serious thing that needs to be dealt with, or it is a hoax. Whichever one it is, many millions of people constituting at least a large minority are wildly deluded.
There's not a ton of room for middle ground. If climate change is not real, then it is a vast power-grab on an utterly unprecedented scale that would justify any efforts to thwart it. If it is real, then the widespread belief in that power grab is a dangerous delusion.
Public policy responses do need to take everything into account, including people who believe things that are wrong. But science allows only so much flexibility there, and when the scales have been upped to the point where the alternatives are "numerous deaths" or "a vast hoax for perpetrating harm on millions", there's not a ton of room for middle ground.
Resolution is not always possible. I wish it were, but it is not. Somebody here is behaving very, very badly, and it may be more effective to simply ignore them -- assuming you can figure out which one they are. If they complain about being ignored, there's no alternative to treating it as a deadweight loss.
In my experience, even my very pro-vaccine friends eventually became more and more unsure whether the government was doing the right thing as the pandemic went on. The fact that we're debating this topic but not climate change also shows it might have more merit than it.
Also as a small-scale experiment: whenever I post these kinds of opinions my comment score does a funny dance where I can see a lot of people are up/downvoting, but the comment score basically stays at 1. That shows that HN itself is pretty split on this issue!
Yeah, I do need some more explanation before understanding this one. Are you talking about the use of social media for propaganda? If that's the case, I have some news for you, the pandemics only destroyed it, it was being used that way for years already.
> destroying small businesses in favor of large corporations
And that one is completely vague.
* Despite taking literally daily tests, I was not allowed into any establishment inside Germany since I did not have a vaccine pass. The only place I could go for months was the supermarket -- it got so bad I left Germany temporarily get away from the measures.
* Lockdowns and curfews abound. My grandparents (not in Germany) were not allowed outside the house except for 1 hour a day, and they had to write down their route exactly in case the police checked them.
* This is from the people, not the government, but the amount of people who would blindly say "trust the science behind the vaccines" is.. insane. Do they understand the concept of science at all? You cannot prove there are no long term effects of a newly developed vaccine, also using a newly developed method of creating vaccines, without an experiment. No matter how smart the scientists are. Trust is not a thing in science. (The same can be said of COVID, but then _let me make my own choice_, based on my own risk factors)
From "What makes Germans so orderly?" https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200531-what-makes-germa...
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?”
As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to a sign of a mobile phone with a cross through it, indicating that we were in the Ruhebereich, the quiet carriage of the train.
“You must be quiet,” she said, before returning to her seat.
“That,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “That’s different.”
From "The lines a German won't cross" https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05KULISH.htm...
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
These are articles published in respectable, mainstream, western news. I'm not alone in thinking that German society is somewhat stricter than most other western societies.
You are right in saying Germans love to follow rules. The restrictions in Italy were also not as hard as in Germany. I gave the example of Germany since that's where I lived during the pandemic, but Poland for example I heard was similar to Germany, and much of Eastern Europe was _worse_ (since for them it was properly life or death -- all the doctors left, and the medical infrastructure is in shambles).
edit: actually, those restrictions did get tightened, like in Germany: https://italygreenpass.com/new-decree-on-super-green-pass-re...
Italy is not associated with strictness or rules, obviously.
edit2: Germany also counts natural infections as 3G+/Superpass. I didn't get naturally infected for a _long_ time.
https://italygreenpass.com/how-do-i-get-a-green-pass-for-tra...
>Italian citizens and permanent residents can get a super green pass when they get vaccinated or recover from Covid. The green pass is the equivalent of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, issued to EU citizens and residents as digital proof that a person has either:
- been vaccinated against COVID-19
- recovered from COVID-19
- received a negative test result
I don't disagree that governments have imposed restrictive COVID measures, especially in Europe. I just am pointing out some limitations and caveats in your examples that makes them less damning than they seem as supposed "abuses of power". At a high level, I agree with you.
Edit: the shift from "use of power" to talking about "abuse of power" was itself a strawman by marcosdumay. We all got baited.
About the cultists repeating "trust the science" or even better, the attack "you don't believe on the science!", yeah, those are about as stupid as the people doubting the main vaccines are safe up to now.
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-19/london-pu...
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-55424855
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/boris-johnson-...
* https://www.elmundo.es/espana/2020/03/13/5e6b844e21efa0dd258...
* https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/poland-in-covid-19-lock...
* https://www.wsj.com/articles/italy-bolsters-quarantine-check...
I could do this all day. I find it hard to believe that you genuinely don't know about any of that.
Not the U.S. though right? I guess Europeans had a much stricter lockdown.
You're right though, I genuinely didn't know it was so strict in Europe and Australia.
Where did those last after the emergency?
The real bitch of it is, that if we would now be facing a much more dangerous virus, people might not take it seriously enough due to covid turning out to be not as dangerous as initially thought.
Fear was made into a virtue, and every government body on earth discovered powers they didn’t know they had. It would play out same or worse, no one learned anything.